Culpability matters. We cannot be ‘forward-looking’ unless we know who we
are dealing with, what is driving them and what they are capable of. We also
need to know ourselves, particularly when we share culpabilities with others.
Culpabilities are shared in this conflict, but they are different in scale and in
nature.
The culpabilities of Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, are essentially
those of temperament. He is ambitious, he is a gambler, and he wraps his
ego around every problem. When he became President in January 2004, he
set himself a priority: restoration of Georgia’s territorial integrity; fatefully, he
also set a deadline: the end of his first term. He totally misjudged the
correlation of forces and, even less excusably, the mood of Russia. Although
he understood that Russia had no respect for weakness, he wrongly and
rashly assumed that it would respect toughness as a substitute for strength.
Towards the aspirations and apprehensions of Georgia’s de jure citizens in
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he showed even less understanding. Finally,
though the culpability was not exclusively his, he had an existential faith in the
backing of the United States, which he manipulated and stretched. But he did
not provoke this conflict. He was provoked by those who knew how to do it.
The culpabilities of NATO were those of wishful thinking and bureaucratic
formalism. It was not always so. After 1991, the Alliance understood that
without integration, the ills and insecurities of Central Europe’s immature,
over-militarised, post-Communist democracies would pose threats to
themselves and others. Although it grasped that the former USSR was more
complex territory, it refused to treat it as forbidden territory, recognising that
the restoration of ‘zones of special interest’ would have adverse
consequences along Russia’s periphery and inside Russia itself. These
principles survived the events of 9/11, but the means of securing them
diminished. The elaborate architecture of NATO-Russia ‘cooperation’ and the
focus on ‘programmes’ and process substituted for negotiation, blunted
warnings and marginalised analysis of Russian policies and plans. For 17
years, NATO almost completely ruled out the re-emergence of Russian
military threats in Europe. Defence cooperation with Georgia advanced
alongside an almost principled refusal to articulate a policy on its territorial
conflicts or assess the dangers they posed.
The culpabilities of the United States lay in over-confidence and neglect.
Once Saakashvili was inaugurated, he became anointed by Washington, as
Shevardnadze once had been, and the trepidations and warnings of less
favoured members of Georgia’s elite were ignored (even after the November
2007 crisis bore them out). Command arrangements for the
Sustainment and Stability Operations Programme were inappropriate for a conflict zone.1
Georgia’s vulnerability and importance, its mercurial leadership, the presence
of US forces and the precariousness of the post-Bucharest security
environment called for high level coordination and direction. There was none.
Instead, by summer 2007 there were a multiplicity of agencies, freelancers,
‘signals’ and back channels leading nowhere.
The culpabilities of the ‘international community’ were those of piety and
impotence. Its leading institutions (the UN and OSCE) are deadlocked by the
opposition of its leading members. Its mechanisms for conflict resolution
institutionalise deadlock. It was never the territorial conflicts in Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Moldova that were frozen, only the mechanisms of
‘resolution’. In practice, the mechanisms became the resolution, and it is not
surprising that in 2004 Georgians elected a president who found this
intolerable.
The culpability of the Russian Federation is overshadowed by the problem it
poses. Seventeen years after the Soviet collapse, Russia continues to define
its interests at the expense of its neighbours. In Yeltsin’s time the right of
these neighbours to develop according to their own models and with partners
of their own choosing was disputed in principle but in practice conceded for a
complex of reasons, of which weakness was only one. Any concessions
during the early years of Putin’s presidency were the product of weakness
alone.2 The threshold was crossed after 2004 thanks to the coloured
revolutions and their evident failings, the West’s further disregard of Russia’s
kto-kovo (zero-sum) scheme of interests (Kosovo, enlargement, missile
defence) and the re-emergence of usable Russian power.
Russia’s culpability lay in priming the mechanism for war. The calibrated
sequence of measures, political and military, undertaken after NATO’s
Bucharest summit, the combat readiness of the 58th Army, the crescendo of
provocations by South Ossetian forces peaking on 6-7 August and the
presence of Russian ‘peacekeepers’ on the scene—not to say all the Russian
‘studies’ of Saakashvili’s aims and character—belie official claims of ‘disbelief’
at news of the Georgian offensive.3 The occupation of Georgian ports and
cities and the cutting of its transport arteries, threats to the Baku–Tbilisi–
Ceyhan pipeline, the extension of the conflict to Abkhazia and the ethnic
cleansing of Georgians from South Ossetia also belie Russia’s ‘humanitarian’
justification for intervention. Finally, the employment of components of the
Black Sea Fleet, whilst supporting clear military objectives, followed a
sequence of provocative statements (and, in Crimea, actions) regarding
Ukraine since Bucharest and obliges us to consider the wider geopolitical
purposes of the conflict.
Where To?
Russia’s Georgia operation appears to be an assiduously planned tactical
step in pursuit of a strategic goal that lacks a strategy. Those who planned it
judged correctly that Georgia’s incapacity and the West’s divisions would
enable Russia to transform the political and military landscape in the south
Caucasus and Black Sea Region without sanction or reprisal. Yet this does
not mean there will be no long-term consequences for Russia. Neither does it
mean that the West will agree to learn the lesson intended: in President
Medvedev’s words, that Russia ‘will no longer tolerate’ its ‘behaviour’ (or, by
implication, influence) in Russia’s ‘regions of privileged interest’. It will hardly
advance this narrowly conceived aim if the West adopts a less charitable
assessment of Russia’s intentions or if the latest application of ‘firm good
neighbourliness’ destroys the residues of friendship on Russia’s periphery.
Russia’s mood (resentment, vengefulness and the worship of power) has
dominated reason, and so long as Russia is both bully and victim, it will draw
errant and possibly dangerous conclusions whether others are meek or
tough.
The Georgian conflict has dealt a powerful blow to Medvedev’s liberal project,
insofar as it existed, and handed Putin as much de facto power as he wishes to take. The political and psychological pressures on the former to be as
strong as the latter can only incapacitate him. The need for ‘strength’ makes
him hostage to constituencies that will never be his (defence industry and the
armed forces), it undermines his power to stand up to ‘national’ capital (those
who do not derive their wealth from integration into the global economy) or
fight for those who do, and it deprives him of authority abroad. To invert
Kissinger’s question, ‘when there is a problem with Russia, who do you call?’
The conflict has unified the country, but in so doing it has made dissent more
perilous and entrenched the positions of those who would be the first to suffer
if a major and increasingly urgent reform of the bureaucracy, economy and
energy sector took place.
Yet then comes the question: for how long? For how long will the neoisolationists
not see what the stock market collapse made obvious: Russia’s
dependency on the global economy? For how long will they ignore the
economic and social costs of the country’s ‘legal nihilism’? For how long will
Russia’s derzhavniki (great power ideologists) disregard the implications of
the South Ossetian/Abkhaz secession for ‘national formations’ in Russia
itself? What will happen when those who see these things are no longer
quiet? Will things get better, or will they get worse before they get better?
Today it is hard to say.
Today it is also hard to say whether the West will recover its nerve or
continue to neuter itself. Yet some changes are visible, and they are not
entirely bad. It has become clear to all but the most besotted that the 1990’s
paradigm of ‘partnership’ has exhausted itself. Although many G7 leaders
speak with conviction about the importance of maintaining cooperation with
Russia, few will pretend that cooperation is enough. Fewer now doubt
Russia’s determination to resurrect its dominance over the former USSR, and
whilst some would accommodate to this, virtually no one believes that a
strong Russia is good for Europe.
By establishing the NATO-Georgia Commission, by mandating it to ‘follow up
the decisions taken at the Bucharest Summit’ and by assessing the needs of
the Georgian army, NATO has quietly let Russia know that the game is not
over. The EU’s agreement to conclude an association agreement with
Ukraine in 2009 sent the same message: integration with Russia’s neighbours
(and the EU’s own) will intensify rather than diminish. Prime Minister Putin
might be right to ask ‘what is the West?’ Whatever it is, it is not leaving.
There would be much to lose if it did. The notion that spheres of influence,
established at the expense of countries residing in them, will generate less misery
than they did before 1914 or prove any more stable is based on myth
rather than realism. Our task is not to vindicate Russia’s outmoded paradigm
of security, but create the conditions that will induce Russians, in their own
interests, to question it. That will not be done by symbolic and provocative
steps (e.g., MAP), but it will require practical measures to strengthen the
security of neighbours and restore their confidence in the West and
themselves.
James Sherr September 2008